In Search of the Perfect Laptop

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Right now, I have a number of laptop computers in the Case House. Some are in for testing and review, while others are units I’ve used over time. Alas, I still haven’t found the perfect laptop.

Several years back, Ziff Davis supplied me with a Thinkpad T41. At around 5lbs, with a mobile Radeon 9600 GPU and a Pentium M 1.8GHz CPU, it seemed ideal. Alas, over time, it became slow and sluggish. Or, rather, the apps I loaded onto the system made it seem that way. The last straw was when I loaded up Office 2007 and the whole affair began to move like molasses.

Did I need Office 2007? In this case, yes—specifically, Excel 2007, because we’re using the shiny new charting module for all our benchmark charts.

Around the Case House, we’ve been using an Asus built laptop with a 15.4-inch diagonal display, Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz and 2GB of RAM. The display has a native resolution of 1680×1050, which seemed like the sweet spot for a display this size. But in other ways, the Asus was too heavy and too bulky to carry around.

In the past year, I’d also been occasionally using a Dell XPS M1210, which has been on loan from Dell, and came equipped with a 2GHz Core Duo CPU, 2GB of RAM and a mobile broadband card (Verizon EVDO.) I wanted to experiment with carrying around a fairly small, but still full-featured. In addition to the CPU, the Dell also had an Nvidia GeForce Go 7400. The EVDO card has been particularly useful at times, when I needed to connect to the Internet in the absence of Wi-Fi or wired connections.

However, the 12-inch screen seemed tiny, and the 1280×800 resolution felt too limiting. The resolution wasn’t that big a deal, but the physical size of the display felt cramped. Also, the keyboard had a couple of minor annoyances—the worst of which was the ridge around the trackpad. I would hit this ridge with my thumb instead of the space bar, resulting in frequent typos.

So it was on to something else—a MacBook Pro.

I now have a fairly new model MacBook Pro, with LED backlit display, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. The first thing I did with it was upgrade to Leopard (Mac OS 10.5.) The second thing I did was run Boot Camp and install Windows Vista.

I never intended to use Mac OS as my primary operating system—mostly because I have too much invested in PC software. Jason Cross has been using his MacBook Pro with great success as a Vista platform. So I did the same thing.

Overall, the MacBook Pro has been a speedy and, generally, stable Vista platform. However, it has its own set of limitations. One issue was the display—1440×900 just was too few pixels for a 15.4 inch display. The other issue was the keyboard. Don’t get me wrong, the keyboard feels pretty good when typing. But being a Mac, it suffers from the lack of dedicated PageUp/PageDn, INS and DEL key. The absence of the DEL key is probably the most annoying.

Then there’s the trackpad. It’s very wide, and extremely touchy. When I’m typing, the cursor focus often wanders wildly around the screen. I should note that this doesn’t seem to occur when running it as a native Mac OS X box. The problem seems to lie in the Windows driver.

Perhaps more annoying is the lack of current driver support for the GeForce 8600 GT Go GPU. I finally found a hacked driver that allowed me to enable Aero and even run some games, but the driver has other glitches, like the inability to set the external display to anything higher than 1024×768. And whoever thought that only two USB ports was enough should be forced to carry around a one pound powered USB hub for all eternity.

There’s the newer Dell XPS M1330, which seems pretty cool, but that 1280×800 pixel thing bothers me in what is otherwise an ideal laptop. The new XPS 1530 also seems cool, but it’s too freaking heavy, at over six pounds.

13.3, 14 or 15.4 inch wide screen display. If it’s 14 inches, I’d like it to be 1440×900. A 15.4 inch display should be 1680×1050. I could probably live with a 13.3 inch, 1280×800 display—but I’d prefer just a bit more.

Discrete graphics chip, mostly for better Aero and multiple display support, not so much for gaming.

Really, really good keyboard. (The Dell XPS M1330 is a big improvement over the M1210; the Lenovo’s have very good keyboards, too.)

Under five pounds. Under 4.5 lbs would be even better.

Lots of ports—four USB at a minimum, one FireWire, a gigabit Ethernet port. A digital video port (DVI or HDMI) plus VGA would be a major plus.

A trackpad that’s easy to disable when not needed.

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi are essential; secondarily, a mobile broadband card would be nice, but not a must-have.

It should be easy for the end-user to upgrade the hard drive and memory. Bonus points go to the manufacturer that makes it easy to upgrade the GPU and CPU.

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